The piece of wood weighing 6 kg that was found on the tracks
A passenger train hit a thick piece of wood kept on the tracks on Thursday night in what is being suspected as a sabotage in Uttar Pradesh again. The incident comes a month after an empty gas cylinder was found on the tracks near Prempur railway station in UP's Kanpur, and 10 detonators were found on a railway track in an attempt to blow up a train carrying army personnel in Madhya Pradesh's Burhanpur district.
Train No. 14236 Bareilly-Varanasi Express running between Delhi and Lucknow hit the two-feet-long piece of wood weighing over 6 kg and dragged it for some distance. It got wedged under the metal wheels, officials said. The train driver, or the loco pilot, managed to stop the train safely, they said.
The incident damaged a signalling device on the tracks, which affected the Lucknow-Hardoi up and down lines and led to loco pilots of other trains to operate with caution.
A first information report (FIR) has been filed with the Malihabad police station.
The nearest railway station issued a warning to station masters, and sent an inspection team to look into the matter. The inspection team and the loco pilot pulled out the wood with great difficulty, officials said, adding it disrupted railway traffic for two hours.
READ | Detonators, Gas Cylinder Found On Rail Tracks In UP, Madhya Pradesh
Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel also came to the site to secure the area and helped remove the thick piece of wood, officials said.
"When the incident was reported by the loco pilot, the RPF found a machete and a piece of wood weighing about 6 kg near the track. An FIR has been filed against unknown people with Malihabad police station," Northern Railway spokesperson Himanshu Shehkar Upadhyay said in a statement.
The central government has taken recent incidents of sabotage attempts on railway tracks very seriously, and tasked the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to look into the cases.
The September incident when detonators were found on the tracks happened near Sagphata railway station in Madhya Pradesh; it targeted the army's special train travelling from Jammu and Kashmir to Karnataka. As the train passed over the detonators, the loco pilot became alert due to an explosion and promptly stopped the train. No one was injured.
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In another worrying incident, an empty gas cylinder was found on the tracks near Prempur railway station in Kanpur on September 22. The driver of a freight train had to apply emergency brakes to stop it.
The NIA has begun a preliminary enquiry to ascertain any sabotage angle in recent train derailments and accidents, officials said on Friday, news agency PTI reported. Nothing concrete has come up so far to suggest there were sabotage attempts in these train derailments or accidents. The NIA is looking into four such cases.
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had last month said the railway administration was on alert against potential train sabotage attempts, and was holding talks with the authorities including the NIA and police in several states.